Hey kids: A great excuse not to eat your veggies

If you don’t have kids under the age of five, chances are you’ve never heard of the Doodlebops. That’s a good thing. My daughter, however, likes the show, and her favorite episode is one where two bandmates try to get the third, Rooney, to try cauliflower.

The episode’s end is predictable, of course: Rooney tries cauliflower and likes it. The real-life result is also predictable: the brainwashing didn’t work. My daughter doesn’t like cauliflower, and will only be persuaded to eat some if it’s drowned in Ranch dressing. That kind of defeats the purpose.

Purdue

Yummy to your tummy?

I can’t blame the kid. I can’t stand certain vegetables. I’m guessing that means my genes call for taste receptors that are sensitive to a bitter chemical in veggies like raw broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts. More from Nature:

Mari Sandell and Paul Breslin of Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, wanted to test the theory. They gave the willing victims 17 raw vegetables known to be rich in glucosinolates — a shopping list that includes some vegetables that have nauseated generations of school kids, such as broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, radish and turnips.

The volunteers also swallowed 11 vegetables that are bitter but lack glucosinolates, including aubergine, bitter melon and spinach. The veggies were served raw because cooking can alter their taste. Each person chewed the vegetable ten times to the tick of a metronome; then they spat and cleaned their mouth with water and crackers.

Swabs were also taken of the volunteers’ cheek cells so that researchers could determine whether they carried none, one, or two ‘sensitive’ copies of the taste receptor gene that allows taste of PTC.

People carrying two ‘sensitive’ copies of the gene rated the glucosinolate-carrying vegetables as around 60 percent more bitter than the group carrying two ‘insensitive’ copies of the gene. The two groups ranked the vegetables lacking glucosinolates as equally bitter.

What a great excuse that would have made at the dinner table when I was a kid: “Mom, I can’t eat those Brussels sprouts because my taste receptor genes code for a form of TAS2R that’s sensitive to glucosinolates!”

11 Responses

Very interesting story Eric, and like you I tried for years to get my kids to like veggies, my son did, but my daughter, no way. However, when she turned 17 last year and started looking at colleges, she wanted to lose a few pounds. So she is now a full blown vegetarian, not an ovulo-lacto-piscean type (who eats eggs, milk products and fish), but nothing but veggies. Go figure, I would have thought she had the gene too, but I guess it was just rebeling against authority after all.

Anyway, my objection to cauliflower is not the taste, it’s the texture. It’s ‘icky.’ I will eat yummy brussel sprouts (even without the butter) or broccoli all day long, but white brain-looking, nasty-textured icky cauliflower — no thanks.

As for the others, I don’t think I’d know an aubergine or bitter melon if they hit me in the forehead during a food fight. But spinach is a staple of my diet — more’s the pity given this E. coli outbreak.

And asparagus, Mmmmmmm. Now you can talk about mercaptan, enzymes, smell receptors and genetics. Mythology holds that people who make and can smell the particularly interesting asparagus metabolite are smarter than those who don’t, so maybe I get my 3-5 points of IQ back on this one.

I have six children. We never made any fuss about likes or dislikes at the dinner table. Guess what? All of them eat just about any vegatable we put in front of them. No one makes fun of anyone for not eating a particular item. It’s more like “Oh, you don’t want that? Can I have it!?” Genetics may have something to do with how we taste, but when it comes to my crew, it seems that an empty stomach trumps.

SciGuy, you need to use your computer and consult the all mighty God errr Google and you will find all kinds of great recipies for veggies that does not involve the boiling, blah, or drowning in dressing.

Hint hint: stir frying in good oils with a little spice(flavor not heat) and you will be amazed…

Maybe I’m mistaken, but I thought I read a number of years back that the taste reciptors in children are quite dramatically different than those in adults resulting in a sense of taste requiring much more bland and/or sweet foods. Personally, I like broccali and cauliflower.

In my experience, aroma is more important than taste. For instance, it’s a well known fact that wine tasters are not better “tasters” because there are only 4 basic tastes to food, maybe 5 if you agree with that umami thing. However, they do “smell” better. Perception of odors is way more complicated than tastes and actually what we usually understand by taste is more related to the odor of the food than to its actual taste. That’s what we call flavour. And people really like or dislike the flavor of things, not their taste.

If you think about it, that’s the only plausible explanation to why people like or dislike tastes of food.

Maybe I’m just oversimplifying, but my take is that we don’t usually like veggies because they don’t have enough protein and fat. And we’re genetically built to seek and store fat (the more I look to my belly the more convinced I am of this fact) and protein because they will ensure our survival. That is also consistent with the umami basic taste.

I also question the applicability of this test. How am I supposed to relate my experiences eating brussel sprouts with “[…] chewed the vegetable ten times to the tick of a metronome; then they spat and cleaned their mouth with water and crackers”. I’ve never eaten vegetables that way, and I hove I never have to. However I’ve eaten them like Jean Pierre says and they’re actually very nice. Rosemary and olive oil work wonders with brussel sprouts

I really think this is just another example of Science Baloney. Somebody’s grant must be up for renewal so they spent some quality time with the press.

Hey, there’s an idea. Add glucosinolates to things like french fries and hamburgers, and a lot of kids would stop eating them. Or else they’d love their veggies because they taste just like french fries and hamburgers.

Can I get a research grant to study that? I figure $5 million ought to do it.